Exoplanet: First Contact - Kickstarter Update #11

In Kickstarter update #11 the Exoplanet: First Contact devs show 22 minutes of gameplay:

We believe that this simple quest will be a great example of the things you should expect in Exoplanet’s Beta, and the final release of the Chapter (on a much larger scale, of course). Longer missions will involve more factions and will include complex objectives with many optional goals. Short or long, they all will have common features: those that are our design pillars for creating quests that we would like to solve ourselves as players. From the perspective of a game developer, it’s far more difficult to work on such non-linear quests than on the standard ”filler” side-activities or heavily story-driven main quest missions. Luckily in the last 3 years, we have proved that our team never gives up facing this kind of difficulties.

According to our design philosophy, all quests in Exoplanet must follow a set of rules:

• K’Tharsis is a wild planet where homo homini lupus est (in our case the proverb works well for the aborigines and other aliens too) and everyone on this cruel Frontier world wants to make profit of the others –including the NPC’s, who will try to manipulate Jack Sharp. They are not “vending machines” stuffed with quests for players to take advantage of them.
• Players can refuse to do certain quests or abort the mission if they don’t like the outcome or the actions that must be taken to complete it. The world will react to this decision, though.
• Patient players will always make more profit and get extra rewards. Impatient players can kill everyone and rush for the quickest way to achieve their goals. Sooner or later, they will face the consequences of their deeds.
• All the actions that players take during a quest must be visualized (e.g. items will be placed on or removed from locations, NPC’s will spawn and disappear, the environments will change adding new dangers, various events will be activated, etc.).

The final result should resemble gameplay sequences similar to those you can see in the video above. Please be aware that this is still work in progress and many things will change, including the options to solve this particular quest, and its consequences. At the end, there is still a possibility that someone is willing to pay for slaying Angry Jag and putting his head on a stake, starting another quest or, why not, an entire chain of them. You will be able to discover this by yourself in our upcoming alpha patches.

And last but not least, we must thank Julian Höning for lending us his great voice to make the commentary for this update. Julian is our candidate for recording English and German voiceovers for some of the characters living on K'Tharsis. We believe he will make a perfect fit for certain NPC’s. Please share your thoughts and let us know what you think of his voice in the context of Exoplanet!